20 Jan 25

It is another night with the heat pad. The ancient looking heater by my bed worked for a few days but then I made the mistake of fiddling with the knobs (there’s no clear on/off logic) and now it’s gone cold. It’s nearly a week since I left SeaTac and I’ve stopped feeling lonesome when I crawl into bed, it feels almost normal. Tonight I met Christoph at the old church for a free concert of classical music and sat in the upper area by the organ loft with my eyes closed feeling transported by the music. The organ player with his back to us and the horn player’s gentle swaying; all the Germans in the pews with their scarves and the men with their balding heads and the women’s close-cropped cuts, their hair all white, everyone smiling or closing their eyes, feeling part of a community, feeling far away from the States for a time. At the end Christoph says and now we are invited to a reception in the front of the church, so we descend the spiral wooden steps and shuffle through the dark toward the altar where they are pouring sekt and eating peanuts. I’m asked how I feel about the big day tomorrow in America. Being here I can pretend it’s not real, but I’ve been pretending too long.

Christoph turns 80 in August, Benny’s father, married to an American once (Benny’s mother), son to a Nazi soldier who returned home from the war and introduced himself to Christoph, “I am your father.” We don’t talk about these things anymore but Christoph, being a former history teacher, has a deep respect for the past. The Nazis never went away he said, they just changed uniforms.

Mom and I went for tea at the Afghan family’s house, the Rahimis’ place. They speak a little German and the oldest son, some English. We sat in their kitchen with a pot of tea, some dried apricots and dates. They have two parakeets with names I instantly forgot, who looked down upon us from the kitchen cabinets and preened themselves. You could tell how they were trying to make the German apartment more like their home in Afghanistan, with the arched doorways and sparse seating in the living area, ornate pillows on the floor. These people had been through so much worse than I ever had, and there was some solace in that. Maybe we could endure a bad president, we’d need to.

We were living here when the immigrant crisis hit in 2015, and Germany’s open-arms approach seemed to backfire and stoke the right, Merkel’s conservative politics not conservative enough. And was it more a tactic of Putin’s to weaponize immigration and weaken the EU? It worked.

The immigrant housing is still on the edge of the farmlands on the outskirts of town, gray, boxy structures stacked in a row far enough away you’re not bothered by them but close enough they can still hear the church bells toll. Maybe the Rahimis like my mom because they see a common immigrant in her, an outsider, or maybe the wife Armeda is just lonely.

The boy Amir says to me in English I can show you around the towns if you like, but I probably won’t. We go back to our place and sitting room and check back in online.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Travelogues

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, journal writing, Memoir, travel